Police follow up new leads in Lawrence case

Detectives were yesterday investigating new leads on the unsolved racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, after a BBC TV programme triggered 60 calls to a police hotline offering information about the killers.

The Panorama documentary claimed that the hunt for the killers was marred by the inaction of a corrupt police officer, and also alleged that the alibis of the five prime suspects were fabricated.

Mr Lawrence was stabbed to death at a London bus stop in April 1993 by a white gang, but despite a torrent of information to police, the killers escaped justice because of incompetence and institutional racism among officers.

Police sources said several calls were interesting and would be followed up. Some offered new information linking some of the five - Neil Acourt, his brother Jamie, David Norris, Gary Dobson and Luke Knight - to the murder, a police source said, though it is too early to talk of a breakthrough.Yesterday London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, branded the five as "guilty as hell," though he said bringing them to justice would be "very difficult".

He also said there was corruption involved in the first police team to investigate the murder, following the BBC programme's reporting of allegations that a detective, supposed to be hunting Stephen's killers, was in the pay of the gangster father of one of the five. Mr Livingstone said on London's LBC Radio: "Trying to prove corruption that took place 12 or 13 years ago is very, very difficult. I'm certain it's true."

Yesterday the Met's deputy commissioner, Paul Stephenson, denied a claim by a police informer that the force had buried evidence of corruption, and kept it from the Lawrence public inquiry examining police failings: "The suggestion I think that has been made that the Metropolitan police went out of its way to mislead a public inquiry - I have absolutely no reason at all to believe that is true, quite the reverse. We have an audit trail of letters suggesting the opposite, in my view. We did write to the [Macpherson] inquiry ... saying this individual was the subject of a corruption investigation."